Laura Passin's previous work for The Toast can be found here. Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), among her many other accomplishments, wrote some of the great kiss-off poems of modern literature. As a woman who unabashedly loved sex, with men and women, and who was keenly aware of the difference between the societal expectations for women and her own daring persona, she had an uncanny ability to turn what seems to be self-deprecation into…

Woolgathering from Playing Cards in Purgatory, oil on panel, Kelli Hoppmann, 2002 They all cheat, of course: on spouses, at games, or themselves. They color their hair even though their masks would cover it. They practice unnatural expressions, wear heavy gowns with hidden pockets, conceal deadly weapons. Not the least of which are their own bodies. But they are mere amateurs compared to you: their arrows fly disappointingly straight, and they never notice that your horns curve backward. You could easily have them naked in a few minutes…

You Can Take It In Spades At the blood donation center I am my most brave self and it is early early, but I’ve been up for a while. I had to eat breakfast, a strange undertaking. I stood over the sink chewing a chunk of baguette that did not want to go down. Remember when I bet you twenty dollars you couldn’t eat a slice of Wonder Bread in under a minute? The nurse…

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open. Muriel Rukeyser wrote that in 1968, even though she'd been splitting the world open for decades already. She'd gone from literary wunderkind to lefty pariah to feminist heroine precisely because of her commitment to telling the truth--about one woman's life, yes, but also about many, many women's lives, about the lives that weren't yet celebrated in poetry.